Factors Driving Consumer Adoption of Savings & Investments FinTech Applications in the UK.

Abstract

Abstract

Financial Technology (Fintech) has become a central element of modern financial life, constantly expanding choices, and shifting ways in which individuals consume and interact with financial services (Leong & Sung, 2018).  According to the EY Global FinTech Adoption Index, the percentage of FinTech users is increasing, and has increased significantly from 16.0% in 2015 to 33.0% in 2017 (EY, 2017). A follow up study in 2019 showed that fintech adoption and awareness continues to increase and adoption of FinTech services has reached 64% across the globe (EY, 2019). Technology adoption has become a popular area of study within the information systems literature among researchers in a quest to continually understand the various factors that influence individual acceptance and use of emerging technology (Granic & Marangunic, 2019).

In the financial industry, there is evident shifting and switching from traditional financial outlets to more convenient fintech solutions that is driven by changing customer preferences because of advances in technology (Bernardo, 2017). This research aims to establish key drivers of this shift and factors that explain consumers’ adoption and use of fintech solutions. The identification of the drivers of this migration towards fintech not only gives better insight into motivations of this migration to developers but also from a regulatory perspective could help in monitoring the developments in the financial system and stability of it as a whole.

There is limited empirical studies explaining adoption of Fintech in financial services, (Singh, Sahni, & Kovid, 2020). This research focuses on the technology of savings and investments apps and proposes to create a conceptual framework that extends the generalisability of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) (Vankatesh, Morris, Davis, & Davis, 2003) and Self-Efficacy (Bandura, 1986) theories towards evaluating and understanding factors that drive Fintech adoption by integrating financial consumption attributes such as perceived risk, trust and security alongside the core constructs of UTAUT and Self Efficacy theories. These factors are not included in the theories being tested but are highly pertinent to the study of adoption of fintech in a savings and investment context because of the nature of products involved. This is something that fills a gap in knowledge as Vankatesh, Thong & Xu (2016) highlighted it as needing further research after reviewing the UTAUT theory in 2016 from its original version of 2003.